A hospital bed has a base with castors on it so that it can be moved about. A frame is mounted on the base and overlying it is a patient support surface and a mattress on which the patient is situated. Alongside the patient support surface and the mattress are patient guards that project above the mattress on each side of the bed to keep the patient from inadvertently sliding out of the bed.
A typical hospital bed provided in a patient's room is about 42 inches wide. Although many diagnostic procedures and examinations can be conducted in a patient's resident room without displacing the patient from the hospital bed, very often the patient must be moved from room to room in the course of diagnosis, treatment, recuperation, or the like. To accomplish this currently, the patient must physically be transferred from the standard width hospital bed to a stretcher size narrow width bed for transport within the hospital. Once the procedure or examination is completed and the patient returned to the resident room, he must be physically transferred back to the standard hospital bed. The repeated shifting from bed to bed is both inherently unsettling and potentially injurious for the patient while labor intensive for the nurse or care provider.
A prior solution to these problems is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 4,985,946 assigned to the assignee of the present invention. In U.S. Pat. No. 4,985,946 a hospital bed has a patient head guard on each side of the bed. The head guard is connected to a bed frame by a parallelogram linkage which can be latched at a laterally inward position, thereby narrowing the bed for transport. The head guard is latched at the inward position by a spring loaded pin mounted on the bed frame which engages a slot in a latch plate interconnected to the head guard. When latched at the inward position, the bed guard of U.S. Pat. No. 4,985,946 narrows the hospital bed and still offers protection for the patient during transport.
An additional problem with typical hospital beds having patient side guards is that the patient guards cannot be moved to and secured at conveniently functional positions alongside, or along the length, the bed. Frequently a physician, nurse or care provider requires access to the patients' head or upper torso region for examination or treatment purposes and the patient guard obstructs or hinders this access. Furthermore, hospital beds commonly have the capability of being reconfigured into a chair position or at a minimum having a head panel raised to allow the patient to comfortably sit-up in bed. With the bed in an upright or chair position, the patient guards no longer provide the same level of protection to the patient because they are fixed in a position too far toward the head end of the bed, that is to say, the patient's torso has translated, through pivoting of the head panel of the bed toward the foot end of the bed, while the patient guard has remained fixed nearer the head end of the bed. When convening the bed to a chair or raising the bed to an upright position, the patient is shifted toward the foot end of the bed and is afforded less protection from the fixed patient guards.
Likewise, a control panel for calling a nurse, adjusting the bed, and numerous other functions is commonly situated on the patient side guard. When the patient is in an upright or seated position, these controls mounted to a fixed patient guard are not easily accessible or within reach for the patient.